[Ed Note: Be sure to see the second of two UPDATES added to the bottom of the story below for Prof. Scott Althaus email sent in to note that his University of Illinois report does indeed cite The BRAD BLOG, several times, for our original contribution to their findings.]

The BRAD BLOG broke that story --- the first such scoop of ours to be noticed and picked up by the national media --- back in 2004, prior to the Presidential Election. At the time, the noise we helped cause with the revelations led to the WH being forced to restore terrabytes of documents, audio and video to their website in the week prior to the election. You're welcome.

We initially made the discovery of the missing WH website documents on the night of the Vice-Presidential Debate, after Dick Cheney claimed to be offended by John Edwards' assertion that the U.S. had "taken 90 percent of coalition casualties" in Iraq.

Cheney faked indignation in response, arguing that it was "beyond the pale" that Edwards was ignoring the sacrifices of Iraqis. Not recalling that Iraq was ever named as part of the "Coalition of the Willing," we checked the WH website, only to find the link to the list still there, but the page itself missing. Afterwards, we found many other pages, as well as audio and video, had been illegally removed from the website.

Here's our Special Coverage page, indexing our series of reports on the "White House Website Scrubbing" scandal, beginning in October of 2004.

We're very happy, in any case, that it's now "officially" news, and that the violation of the federal Presidential Records Act that we noted at the time is also confirmed, now that a professor at a university has found the same, and written about it. Guess we'll have to find a professorship somewhere. Haven't gotten to read his original report yet, but I'll assume he offered us the hat-tip we're due.

UPDATE: The above benefit-of-the-doubt, concerning credit where its due, may not be a safe assumption. The rather irony-laden coverage of professor of political science and communication Scott Althaus' findings, as reported by the Daily Illini today, follows. Get a load of this...

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, the U.S. government released a statement on the White House Web site listing the nations involved in the "Coalition of the Willing." However, over a period of several years, different versions of the three releases all appear to be originals. In the case of two releases from the U.S. government Web site, the original document is completely missing from the site.
...
On Nov. 24, Thom Shanker wrote an article in the New York Times, outlining these findings. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC has also recently mentioned the findings on his show.

The feelings students have about the publicity and the findings include mixed reactions.

"I think that it's cool to see your professor make a finding like this," said Eric Lavine, senior in LAS [University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences]. "However, I am not surprised the Bush Administration was involved in this activity."

Other students were surprised with the revelation, hoping that mainstream news media would pay closer attention to the findings.

"I was surprised by Professor Althaus's findings," said Jenn Rice, senior in LAS. "I was also surprised the story was not made into a bigger deal in other news sources."

UPDATE 12/6/08: We dropped Prof. Althaus an email this morning to see if he'd cited our reporting in his findings, and to ask for a copy of the report (since the student-written Daily Illini article hadn't offered an URL for it). He quickly replied back with the following note, mentioning that, indeed, he does cite The BRAD BLOG, as we'd originally hoped and suspected, in his complete report. Much appreciated. His full report, which looks very good, though we've not yet gotten to read it in full, is posted here.

Dear Brad,

I was just in the process of emailing you. As you know, student reporters are in school to learn and the stories they write can sometimes have unfortunate framing. The study we conducted focused not on the removal of a single version of the coalition list, but on chronicling the entire revisionary history of the list across all its primary incarnations we could locate on the White House website. We are certainly aware that others have discovered deletions or isolated edits to the list in the past, and we actually cite your 2004 blog posting in our report.

One argument made in the past has been that these deletions and edits were isolated events. Our study, therefore, focused on showing the extent of the revisionary history of the list, showing how the list has undergone 7 major changes over time, starting within weeks of the ground invasion, and continuing to 2005-2006. In particular, we show that not only were the two oldest versions of the list removed from the White House site, but, more troubling, countries were added and removed from the list over time without updating the date on the press releases, making it seem that those countries were always (or never) part of the original coalition list.

I would like to invite you to read our complete report (the Daily Illini article unfortunately did not include the URL) at http://www.clinecenter.u...edu/airbrushing_history/. I think you will be very interested in the extent of the revisionary history to the coalition list.

Best regards,

Scott

In a followup email, Althaus also noted that while the Daily Illini coverage focused on him as the author of the report, in fact, it was co-authored along with with Kalev Leetaru, the Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the University of Illinois' Cline Center for Democracy.

If it takes four years to find the same error that was reported four years ago, perhaps professorship anyone should want. I'd hate to think exposing voting machine errors, caging, and other nastiness in a timely manner would be reduced to happening four years later, long after the wrong person was in office.

Oh wait...

Not even a hat tip.

Students would do well to ignore their teachings if they are led to believe in hope the corporate media will pay attention any time soon.

Then there's the actual crime. When will that be prosecuted? 25 years from now? They'll have to have a four year study to find out went wrong, then a four year investigation, then silence for four years, then four years of indictments, then four years of courts, then four days of punishment.

The Twin Towers were the asbestos-related liability of what company? Halliburton. Cheney acquired these liabilities from the Bush Crime Family's Dresser Industries when he was CEO of Halliburton - knowing full well that the acquisition would destroy HAL's stock value. Mitigating the Asbestos liability of the Twin Towers meant dismantling them at a cost of $12 billion.

9/11 was arson. The payoff (by the insurers) was pre-arranged. Christine Todd Whitman was told directly by Cheney to lie about the asbestos levels in the air at Ground Zero - as part of the coverup. Remember, it was Cheney who provided the alibi for Gary Condit when just a couple months prior to 9/11, Chandra Levy went missing. She learned of the 9/11 plot and was going to reveal it. Condit was in Cheney's office at the time of her "disappearance." How fucking convenient, eh?

Now, according to "Newsweek" magazine, the California congressman met with Vice President Cheney at about the same time that Levy was in her northwest D.C. apartment going over sites on the Internet, among them travel sites, a local ice cream shop and also the site of the Agriculture Committee on which the congressman sits.

Halliburton was awarded the no-bid contract in Iraq by the Bush
Crime Family as direct quid pro quo for taking Dresser's Asbestos liabilities off their hands. HAL's stock subsequently soared, and both the Bush Crime Family and The Cheney/Rumsfeld Crime Family (and countless other insiders) were enriched.

This is direct evidence of conspiracy, fraud, insider trading, arson, murder and countless other crimes prosecutable under RICO.

Locate Dov Zakheim (9/11 mastermind and enabler) and Kobi Alexander - and waterboard their sorry asses until they confess their direct role in 9/11 planning and implementation, and reveal the entire plot. Can't find them? That's because Cheney's got them hidden in the Witness Protection Program. What was Ken Lay's role? Find him and ask him.

See, that just pisses me off, Brad. How many does this make?--Anyone counting? I can't remember how many times you've been spot on with breaking news that finally emerges in the corporate media months, or years, after the fact(s). WTF?

I been thinking about this a lot. Perhaps, no it's not breaking the first amendment to take the CEO of ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and either remove them from office, or put them in jail. Meanwhile putting new CEO / Manager / Programmer in who allows any journalist to follow any story.

Obviously there's not enough time, to cover every story, but the times we are currently in, are going to require a lot better communications (and secure communications) and feedback than that which currently exists.

So what is the punishment for breaking the Constitution these days? Oh that's right PROMOTION.

But uh, the good news is, these same fascists that are stopping real investigative journalism, are about to get fucked by our economy and markets. Their retirement will be fucked just like ours. Their food will be just as hard to get as ours will, they will have to live in the same shit hole that we do.

Brad may not be credited for the altering of documents story; but bloggers and Brad's contemporaries know full well the truth; futher, this would be but one example of Brad's accomplishments.
What matters is that the information continues to be circulated (as this article is proof of) and it have be revisited at a time of a full on revisionist movement by Bush and his loyal pundits.
I once again find myself thankful for the humble commitment of Mr. Friedman; I find myself there quite often.

People,
Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions regarding acknowledgement. In academia, ones entire career can be ruined by plagerism (eg omission of citation.) News media is much more forgiving in this regard. Clearly Professor Althaus is of high integrity and cites his sources and acknowledges the body work taht precedes his work. Brad Friedman was cited on three occasions in this paper. A more scrupulous reader would verify before making accusations. Brad jumps the gun as well, but he caveathis his remarks by acknowledgin he has yet to read the paper in question

You are to be commended for "being there" and revealing what was really happening long before the MSM ever spend a milisecond on it. Eventually blogs will become the MSM, and let's hope the blogs hold to a much higher level of integrity than the current MSM does.

To Karen from Illinois (comment #9), what is this $7.4 TRILLION loan story? I must have been under a rock. Is there any substance/substantiation to this? Where can we learn more?